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| Wheel of Dharma turn turn turn, tell us the lesson that we should learn. |
I know, initially it was going to be Arabic. I changed my mind afterwards because I've always wanted to learn Hindi. I walked into an Indian restaurant, starting watching some Indian television, and something about the culture said I'd like it. In general I like Indian culture and Hindi was always going to be my first choice, so I switched. After this year, I'll be able to order at any Indian restaurant and watch Bollywood to my heart's content, YEEHA!.
For those of you who do no know, the "1 Year Language Challenge" is where I spend 365 days learning a new language from scratch. I start on January 1st, 2014 and end on December 31st at midnight. After a year, I'll see how far I've come. The rules were like this:
1. The new language could not be too similar to a language I've already studied. Therefore, no Polish, Dutch, Cantonese, Italian, etc.
2. It had to be a living language that a large amount of speakers spoke natively. So no dead languages like Latin or Sanskrit or languages that only two people in the world speak, but won't, because they've been feuding (true story!)
3.It had to be fairly usable after I learned it, so that I could possibly use it. So far, my language skills have kind of/sort of netted me jobs I may not have otherwise got.
I'm a bit of a polyglot. With various levels of fluency, I speak Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, French, Russian, and German. My native language is English. Hindi will be my 9th language. I have a natural talent for language learning, so I've been wanting to do this for quite some time.
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| Soon the secrets of Hindi will be all mine! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! |
This project is part silliness and part science. A lot of what I do to learn languages is weird and I'm a little bit on pins and needles at the thought of sharing it with others. Oh well, I've done embarrassing things before. I want to figure out what my brain does to learn languages. What strategies do I use to pick up new words? What methods work best to assimilate grammar? Testing myself should prove enlightening, and I'll start to understand what my brain does as instinct. Also I'll be closer to my lifelong goal of the ten language mark.
All of my Hindi books are coming in from Amazon hopefully by the first, and one of my former students sent me a Youtube channel with non-stop Hindi music. I've got some websites that teach basic Hindi, so I'm
I've been thinking about the format for the blog. What kinds of things do you guys want to see? Cultural things? Do you actually want to know the exact process I use to pick up words? Do you want me to upload examples of my progress? Video? I'll check in at least weekly. I still have a full time job and I'm starting a new business, so this will probably take all of my spare time outside of those two things. Let me hear your thoughts!
